Analysis Of The Differences Of Community Groups' Views On Government Policies
Introduction
In current age, the viewpoint that significance of education degree is found to be more likely to affect the environment attitude has sparked wide argument recently. It is widely acknowledged that the people who have higher level of education tend to pay more attention to the environmental issues. Therefore, it is meaningful to find out the factors related to the education that affect the perceptions of environmental issues such as educated year and education level and so on. Further, environmental issues would probably be solved by improving public education levels if they actually have direct or indirect positive correlation. In addition, the recent research also found that the working conditions like work level and employment status would probably impact on the attitude to government policies and services. For instance, those people who are unemployed are more easily to complain about the society and current government negatively. So that would be very helpful for the authority to adjust the policy properly for the citizens if we can ensure their relationship correctly. In this research, basically, we will analyse the differences of community groups' views on government policies based on SPSS analysis of different education and working status. Also, it can be divided into two specific parts which are analyzing of the differences between different education states such as education years or education level and perceptions of environmental issues and analyzing of the difference of relationship between supporting for government policies and services and different working status like working hours, work habits, level of treatment and unemployment.
So this experiment has been carried out and the basic data we collect is from the questionnaire provided by Australian Social Attitudes Survey (AuSSA), which is the fifth in a biennial series of studies examining the social attitudes and behaviour of Australian citizens in the Australian and international research community, providing specific modules related to the changing needs of the social research community. For example, in this questionnaire, a couple of topics are included such as issues Australia faces today, health, personal background and different variables and dataset in each section, which give us multiple choices to select the target as well as do a research.
Objectives
The aim of the this research is to figure out the significant difference relationship between community groups' views on government policies and different education as well as working Status and do the difference analysis based on the given data. Through the coping with data and analysis the AuSSA_2011Questionnaire, the numerical results are demonstrate, based on SPSS program. In addition, we will come up with what factors affect the community groups' views in some extents if there is relationship exactly. Of course the community views refer to the people’s viewpoint to environment issues and the attitude to the government current policy. Finally, we will draw upon the conclusion about the relationship between these two elements and which factors would greatly dominate the change of variables. Also, we assume there is significance difference between the education level and the point of environmental issues as well as the work status and attitude to the government policy.
Method
In our experiment, we user one-way ANOVA, also known as F-test, which is a statistical inference method that infers whether the population mean represented by two or more sample means differs by analyzing the data variation. More specifically, the variance of the response variable can be either the difference between different levels of the factor or the sampling process itself. The former can be explained by the factors in the model, while the latter corresponds to the error term part of the model.
In the variance of the response variable, if the difference caused by the different levels of the factor accounts for a significant proportion, then it can be inferred that the factor has a significant effect on the difference of the response variable. Conversely, if the difference caused by the sampling process itself accounts for a significant proportion, which means there is no significant effect on the difference in response variables. Nonparametric tests play a significant role on statistical analysis methods. Together with parameter tests, they form the basic content of statistical inference and it is a method of estimating the overall distribution pattern and the like using sample data in the case where the overall variance is unknown or little known. Further, Chi-square test is a widely used hypothesis test method, which is applied in the statistical inference of classified data, mainly including chi-square test with two ratios or two composition ratio comparisons, multiple rates or multiple composition ratios. Chi-square test and correlation analysis of classified data and it is actually the degree of deviation between the actual observation value and the theoretical inference value of the statistical sample.
Description of the data set
The data of environment in the questionnaire is 25 from b1 to b25 and they are compared with different education levels and we calculate the mean, standard deviation, statistics and p-value. During the experiment, if we want to record into different variables converts the original variable to a new one, we actually do not overwrite the original variables necessarily. Instead, a new name will be applied to the copy of the original variable.
Data result
To be precise, all the p-values are under the confidence level which shows that people with different highest year of schooling have different opinions on environment and the difference is quite significant. Then, what we need to do here is to check the p-value where is less than 0. 05 since we reckon that there is a significance if p-value is lower than 0. 05. AnaVar stands for the analysis variable. Answer represents different options of AnaVa r(as it in questionnaire). N and Median are two descriptive statistics of AnaVar, which gives three significant values there: Statistics, DF and P-value. Generally, we consider that it is statistically significant when P is less than 0. 05 and it is statistically highly significant when P is less than 0. 01. If a value close to 0 indicates that the observed difference is unlikely to be accidental, while a P value close to 1 indicates that there is no difference between the groups except by chance. Therefore, we can clearly see that there are actually some high significant such as air pollution where the question is which is the most important environmental issues in Australia? Or the answer is ‘know nothing at all’ when the question is the causes of these sorts of environmental problems? Also, most people choose that they would like to pay higher tax to protect the environment. Then, we should look at another table which shows the significant difference of factors affecting the viewpoint to the environment issues from ANOVA as below.
From h3, we can easily see that most of people choose the third answer which is ‘No I am not currently in school, college, university or in vocational training’, reaching up to %. Similarly, in h5, most people choose the first answer, which occupies 54% among all the answers and has the highest frequency 1031, which means most people have the level of Year 12 or equivalent. Then, in h6, last answer will be the most popular one which takes up to 33% and the frequency is 1870, much more than others though it is no post-school qualification. From here, it demonstrates the differences of education lead to different opinions to environmental issues.
Discussion
From the result, we can infer that people with high highest level of education tend to behave like: b1 more concerns about environmental issues; b2 regards climate change as the most important problem for Australia; b3 thinks that climate change affects themselves most; b4 grasps plenty knowledge about causes of these sorts of environment problems; b5 owns plenty knowledge about solutions to these sorts of environment problems; b9 is more willing to pay much higher prices for environmental protection; b10 is more willing to pay much higher taxes for environmental protection; b11 is more willing to cut standard of living for environmental protection; b14 considers government should pass laws to regulate citizens to protect the environment; b15 reckons government should pass laws to monitor businesses protect the environment; b16 realizes Australia is currently doing just a little for environmental protection; b17 thinks that using the tax system to reward businesses that protect the environment is the best way to incent businesses to protect the environment; b18 conceives that using the tax system to reward the public that protect the environment is the best way to incent the public to protect the environment; b19 does not think Australia should give priority to anything in order to meet its future energy needs; b22 becomes a member of a group whose main aim is to preserve or protect the environment; b25 thinks Australia should pay a carbon tax.
In fact, we can find that most of parts in our research are consistent with the existing studies that there are significant differences that the education level could have a impact on the opinions of environmental issues and the working status could affect the attitude to the government policy in some extents, yet there are still some different parts found. For example, actually, people who have no post-school qualification occupy the most proportion when they do the questionnaire about environmental thoughts rather than people with higher education level have certainly significant difference to the environmental opinions. Therefore, based on the result of our research, we can figure out that the government can provide higher education for the public or open the relevant class to emphasis the importance of solving environmental issues. Meanwhile, the authority ought to make sure the working status can make people satisfied, in this way, people tend to be approval of the government policy. Also, we will continue to explore which independents that exactly affect the dependent and how they change(Brennan, 2002). The significance difference determines whether the difference between the sample and our assumptions about this topic is purely an opportunity variation, or is caused by an inconsistency between our assumptions and the overall reality. So it is reasonable that we will use more data to explore more characteristics.
Conclusion
In our research, basically, we find out the significant differences of community groups' views on government policies depending on different education and working status. Indeed, the people with higher education are more likely to have their own opinions to environmental issues and the people who have better working status are more likely to be satisfied with government policy as well. By calculating the p-value, we can prove that the significant difference exists if the p value is less than 0. 05 generally. Based on the experiment result, we discover p-values are less than 0. 01, which means there is 99% probability that significant difference is remarkable in this situation. With regard to the limitation, first of all, the data we use may be not fully accurate because the data from bank is based on questionnaire, which cannot stand for the actual thoughts of people, even some people randomly fill up the blank. Besides, we should drop some error or inaccurate data when we deal with the data during preparation stage since those data would probably affect our final result and not reliable. Lastly, the data scale is relatively limited, which could probably not reflect overall real situation by using these limited data.
